Mater artium necessitas

Archive for September, 2006

Sometimes your computer crashes without reason. It happens at any time, for no particular reason.
Other times you’re trying to install a new OS on a brand new PC and at some point, it fails, reboot itself or just hangs.

A couple years ago I had this really depressing experience with a brand new system I was building. All the components were newly bought, but installing the OS (a Linux distro) used to fail almost at the end of the process.
No matter how many times I tried, I could never get to the end of it.
By clever subterfuge I managed to get it installed only to have it crash on a regular basis.
It was unstable, unreliable and after two days wasted banging my head against the walls, I gave up…

Well, no for too long. A flash of inspiration came to me and I popped in the install CD and ran the only utility that was available at the prompt: memtest86.
That simple tool is a godsend (if I may appropriate the word from the believers. I promise to give it back).
After running its various memory tests for 10 minutes it reported errors in one of the RAM sticks installed on the motherboard.
All that aggravation for a puny bit that was not remembering its state…
I promptly returned the RAM and tested the new one for a few hours until I was confident there was no issue with its chips and went my merry way to install the OS I so desperately needed. All went without a hitch.

So my advice is: go to the memtest86 website. Burn the bootable ISO and test your PC from time to time, especially if you have strange intermittent issues that you can’t pin down to a simple software problem.
You’d be amazed at the number of times I had to ditch a stick of RAM… memtest86 saved by sanity countless times.
By the way, consider donating a little bit if it helped you too. That’s always cheaper than a session with a shrink…

I’m not particularly pro -Microsoft but I’m not against it either.
I love Linux, got my RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) a bit more than a year ago and I love Open Source, Linux and all things GNU.

The only thing I really dislike about Microsoft is its marketing, its pricing, its Genuine (Dis)Advantage that nags me every time I need to install something and its lack of openness when it comes to inter-operability with other competing implementations (here I’m particularly thinking about its network protocols that the Samba team tries to decipher and re-implement as an Open Source platform).
On the other hand, Microsoft is made of great programmers, great minds that you can watch on Channel 9 and read on their insightful blogs.

Microsoft is really (I mean REALLY) pro-developer: they understand that the Operating System alone is nothing without lots of applications sitting on top of it, and they offer developers a lot of goodies.
One such useful programme is +Microsoft Empower for ISV_. It’s a simple membership that allows a small software company (ISV meaning Independent Software Developer) to own a number of licenses for its internal use at a fraction of the price it would normally cost.
What you get is pretty wide for a small business: 5 licenses for Windows XP (whatever version), 5 licenses for Microsoft Office, 1 license for Windows 2003 Server and Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint Portal, a MSDN Premium Subscription that covers almost anything else, including 5 licenses for Visual Studio 2005 Pro.
You also get access to MSDN downloads, beta software and tons of libraries, SDK, etc.
A MSDN subscription alone is about US$2000…
The Empower ISV programme is quite cheap and depend on the country you are in.
I paid mine HK$4,260 about US$530.

To get all this you need to register as a Microsoft Partner (that’s free), then apply for the Empower for ISV programme by making a promise to release a commercial software within 2 year at most. You need to give some details and pay your due. After a few days, you get confirmation if your application is accepted or not.
As far as I know, you need to be a company and have a company website, but that may not be mandatory in all regions.
The software you get is the normal US version plus whatever local version there are for your region. My bunch of DVD came in Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, some in Korea and Thai too.
At least, the English version is supplied. For some software, you also get the multilingual version that include European languages as well.
You manage your licenses by login under your MSDN account.

Really, it’s a nice touch from Microsoft to give us poor developers access to all this for such a reasonable price. I can only encourage other small software companies and independent developers to do the same.